Partnership Pays

he seeds of labor-management partnership in the federal sector have been widely sown and are producing a promising harvest, according to Phyllis Segal of the Federal Labor Relations Authority. Segal, who has been FLRA chair since 1994, is encouraged by significant reductions in unfair labor practice litigation. More people are turning to informal resolution to settle disputes.

"Partnerships are one of the unheralded successes of this Administration," Segal says. The governmentwide program was inspired by the success of innovative labor-management arrangements in the private sector. More than 75 percent of executive branch employees work for organizations that have a partnership council, and Segal says the results are favorable. Unfair labor practice (ULP) filings with the FLRA have dropped 28 percent in the last two years. The number of ULP's resolved without full-blown litigation has risen 47 percent, representing considerable cost savings. Kelly Air Force Base alone reported avoiding $2 million in litigation costs by resolving disputes through the partnership route. Between 1992 and 1994, the number of grievances fell from 47 to 12, and ULP filings were reduced from 193 to only 1. Besides the money saved, quality of life has improved for many of the executives, managers and union officials who once spent much of their time bogged down in adversarial dispute resolution procedures.

As a member of the National Partnership Council, which oversees and promotes these cooperative efforts, Segal has seen improvements that reach beyond complaint processing. NASA, for example, has projected savings of $40 million from program and operational changes suggested by labor-management groups. The Denver Mint has reported quality and productivity improvements since partnership transformed its adversarial labor relations climate.

To help foster a climate for partnerships, Segal says the FLRA must promote stable, constructive labor relations. Congress recognized that collective bargaining and amicable dispute resolution were in the public interest when it enacted the Federal Service Labor-Management Relations Statute as part of the 1978 Civil Service Reform Act. The Federal Labor Relations Authority, which was created to help guide these processes, consists of the following four independent decision-making bodies:

• The Office of Administrative Law Judges, whose primary task is deciding ULP cases.

• The Office of the General Counsel, which works through regional offices to decide representation issues and supervises the investigation and prosecution of ULP charges.

• The Federal Service Impasses Panel, which resolves agency-union impasses arising from negotiations over conditions of employment.

• The Authority itself, which decides negotiability cases and hears appeals of ULP decisions, representation issues and grievance arbitration awards.

But Segal's vision takes her agency far beyond the basic functions of investigation, prosecution and adjudication. She sees a responsibility to provide training and facilitation to equip unions and management to resolve disputes without resorting to adjudicatory processes. The Office of General Counsel actively seeks settlement opportunities at every stage of a ULP charge. Last spring, the FLRA's Office of Administrative Law Judges began a pilot project in which a judge (other than the trial judge) conducts settlement negotiations in some ULP cases. Oral argument procedures were also expedited under the pilot project. Since the project began, 76 percent of the cases covered have been settled.

The pilot project was launched during the Authority's ULP Trial Practice Task Force review aimed at instituting more effective and expeditious dispute resolution. Pressure on agencies to downsize and streamline could create unprecedented adjudication workloads without simpler and less formal processes. With 214 employees, Segal says her agency is one-third smaller than it was in 1980, but its workload is 50 percent bigger. One reason is reorganizations, which inevitably raise questions about which employees are represented by a bargaining unit and which union an agency must bargain with. Last summer, the FLRA revised its regulations to cut the number of union representation petitions from seven to one, reduce by half the number of copies to be filed, expedite various election procedures, and offer FLRA staff to help resolve issues.

The FLRA has established a collaboration and dispute resolution program headed by a manager from each of its divisions. After finding that 47 percent of arbitration appeals and 59 percent of negotiability appeals filed over a period of a year and a half were procedurally deficient, a task force developed user-friendly checklists for appellants to help avoid delays and repeated work. Internally, the Authority is eliminating subregional offices and experimenting with telecommuting and home-based work.

Partnerships can provide much more than a mechanism for dispute resolution. From her perspective, Segal sees great potential for promoting more effective and efficient government without minimizing workplace issues. "We are transforming a labor relations culture that was adversarial, confrontational and dysfunctional," she says. "It will take sustained commitment, but partnerships will become the way of doing business because of what they can accomplish."